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December 31, 2005

I have, on occasion, been known to buy books. Just a few. (Hey! Quit laughing, would you?) Given my proclivities in this area, it should come as no surprise that I've been the department's library coordinator since 2002. The basic procedure is simple: either a) I get catalogs, choose the books, prioritize the orders, and ask one of our work-study assistants to write up "yellow cards" for the acquisitions librarian, or b) the acquisitions librarian sends me a stack of Choice review slips and I prioritize (or discard) them. In addition, my colleagues put in special requests, especially if they're in areas serviced largely by overseas publishers. If the procedure is simple, however, the decision-making process is a little more complicated.

In the beginning, my purchasing philosophy was based on a remarkably simple principle--namely, of Coolness. After about two months, however, reality intruded itself. Reality, in case you're wondering, translates into money. Brockport doesn't support a full-fledged research library; while I'm told that we have the largest holdings of all the four-year SUNY colleges, it's still the case that there's one floor for the main collection, one for reference books and offices, and one for periodicals and multimedia. Needless to say, our department's acquisitions budget bears no resemblance to, say, that of the English department at Yale. In fact, we can only afford to purchase a small fraction of what's published each year. What to do?

I begin by asking myself two questions:

If we have a person in field X, what are his or her scholarly interests?

Are we teaching certain courses in field X on a regular basis?

Because we have a fairly small department, it's easy enough to remember that colleague A is interested in the Transcendentalists, colleague B in literature of the Cold War era, and so on. Similarly, it's also easy to keep tabs on our course offerings; thus, given that we frequently teach the history of the novel but rarely offer entire courses on eighteenth-century poetry, the book orders have to be adjusted accordingly. The unfortunate downside of this approach, as you might expect, is that when field X goes missing, so do its books. (When I arrived in '99, Victorian literature had been AWOL for a bit, and so the holdings needed a bit of work.) Moreover, even while trying to keep my colleagues in books--if not clover--I have to balance their special interests against a given book's more general utility for our students. If Choice tells me that a book is "optional," in other words, or "accessible only to advanced graduate students," then it will probably go the way of all texts.

So, let's say a book has survived questions #1 and #2 with flying colors. Then what? The library asks us to categorize books as either first or second choices. A first-choice book will immediately be put into the ordering queue (bear in mind that we have a backlog, as we're asked to encumber our budget as early in the year as possible). Second-choice book orders sit around in a drawer until one of three things happens: 1) we get extra money, 2) I go back and upgrade it, 3) I discard it. I generally divide orders as follows, bearing in mind that we primarily serve an undergraduate population:

Unfortunately, some scholarly editions--I'm looking at you, Pickering & Chatto--are consistently priced out of our reach. Nevertheless, it's always my (logical!) policy to get as much literature as possible on the shelves. As we're near the University of Rochester and have a very efficient ILL program, I don't feel uncomfortable about downgrading extremely specialized secondary texts; if one of my colleagues really needs such a book in the collection, we can always go back and move it into the first-choice queue.

December 30, 2005

A contributor to NASSR-L led me to Francis Heaney's Holy Tango of Literature, an anthology of parodies that all begin with an anagram of the original author's name. Thus, Gerard Manley Hopkins becomes "Kong Ran My Dealership" ("
I hired last summer someone simian,/King Kong of Indies islands, fifty-foot-fierce Gorilla, out of hiding/After falling, feigning final death but breathing yet, and biding/Time there, how he swore that he could sell any third-rate thing/In a car lot!"). Annoying formatting glitches aside--all of the apostrophes have turned into question marks--there are some funny send-ups here.

December 28, 2005

Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird reads, in some respects, like a dry run for her most recent novel, Case Histories. Like Case Histories, Emotionally Weird playfully jumbles and juggles a number of popular genres, including detective fiction, academic satire, and gothic; like Case Histories, Emotionally Weird insists on the emotional power of storytelling itself. At the same time as it dwells in the recognizably postmodern world of metafiction, however, Emotionally Weird also looks back to the nineteenth-century novel--whether in the looming obstacle of a paper on George Eliot or a freewheeling plot structure that melds farce and Lewis Carroll.

Effie (short for Euphemia) is marooned in a decaying manor on an isolated island with the woman she thinks is her mother, Nora (short for Eleanora). Effie tells Nora stories about her bizarre adventures in the English department at the University of Dundee; Nora tells Effie stories about both of their mysterious pasts. In turn, Effie intersperses her tales of academic woe with her creative writing paper, a comically cringe-inducing attempt at detective fiction called The Hand of Fate, as well as with occasional indigestible chunks of a critical essay on Middlemarch. Other writers muscle their way in as well, offering us a would-be exercise in postmodern experimental fiction, an aspiring Mills & Boon romance, and a dreary, multivolume fantasy novel in the very post-Tolkien tradition. And then there's Effie's sluggish (and slug-like) boyfriend, Bob, who views the world in terms conveniently derived from Star Trek (classic version--this is, after all, the 1970s). While all this is going on, Nora--who appears to prefer her fiction the old-fashioned way, straight up with lots of linear plotting--occasionally drops in some tart comments about the way that Effie's "novel" seems to be going.

While the novel's content sends up postmodern jargon, then, the novel itself is very much in the postmodern metafictional mode. Content-wise, the academic satire is the novel's least interesting contribution; despite the blurb ("a stinging critique of modern literary studies," says The Washington Post Book World), a reader acquainted with Small World or Straight Man or Book or, heaven help us, Murder at the MLA will not find much in the way of interest here. That being said, the satirical sections become much more provocative when taken not as reflections on the academic profession, but as critiques of a certain type of non-creative or -productive language. Whether the critical rhetoric in question belongs to the age of James or the age of Derrida, it makes nothing happen. Dr. Archie McCue, for example, always talks like this (italics Atkinson's):

'When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist--challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the "intelligibility of the world".' Archie paused. 'What do you think of this statement? Anyone?' No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about. (27)

Archie, whose tutorials appear to consist entirely of theory-speak, is jargon in search of an auditor. While Effie tells stories to Nora--and, in so doing, ultimately manages to conjure up a satisfactory if amusingly strained ending for herself--Archie settles for talking about language at his bored (and semi-captive) audience. His plaintive hope for a response from some indefinite "you" suggests the actual aimlessness of this purportedly philosophical rhetoric, as well as its own inability to disrupt much of anything. Still, it is this critical language that is "dislocated" and "disconnected"--so disconnected that Effie can "speak" it without actually assigning a meaning to it: '"Well, I suppose these days [...] there's an epistemological shift in fiction writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won't suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world." I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to' (44). In the critical language game, the author is, for all intents and purposes, dead; Effie's jargon, which might as well have been created by the postmodernism generator, enters into a supposed conversation while leaving her out of it. (Nevertheless, it's worth remembering that Effie can spin New Critical rhetoric as well; it's all grist for the novel's mill.)

Atkinson's novel celebrates not linear plotting--as Nora keeps grousing, Effie's rambunctious "plot" hardly merits the name--but the pleasures of storytelling for its own end. Storytelling, even the most inept storytelling, works on the reader and on the world: Effie, despite her otherwise sensible aversion, can't help checking in on the fantasy epic; Archie's bizarre pomo experiment turns out to create accidents in Effie's "real" narrative frame (and, in an act of magic, erase them); and Nora, who is afraid of where Effie's story may lead, still finds herself listening compulsively. It's worth noting that, at one level, poor senile Prof. Cousins has it right: '"But don't you think, Archie," Prof. Cousins said mildly, "that really all literature is about the search for identity?"' (39) After all, by the end of the novel, Effie has figured out her identity (its a true Rube Goldberg contraption), and a remarkable number of people manage to live Happily Ever After. But Prof. Cousins still puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Emotionally Weird celebrates not the "search for identity," but the search for identity--the narrative process itself, not its (as here) sometimes ludicrous ends.

For some reason, all attendees follow a dress code largely appropriate to crows. (I'm no exception to this rule, I hasten to add: I'm typing this entry in a black suit with a red shirt. The Stendhal look, as it were...) Wouldn't it be fun if someone were to show up in, oh, blazing orange?

Now that I know that I'm occupying a room with a dysfunctional alarm clock--a somewhat nervewracking discovery when you have to be interviewing someone in a different part of the hotel thirty minutes after you wake up--I feel somewhat more sympathy for my tardy undergraduates. Somewhat, mind you.

I'm reading Balzac's Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes (a.k.a. A Harlot High and Low, in the Penguin translation), and yesterday had a flash of inspiration: when people say "Dickensian," they really mean "Balzacian" (or Balzacean?).

December 26, 2005

Scott is spreading the love, but with love comes responsibility (or, at least, a meme). Blogs I read compulsively, by folks of varying persuasions, some of whom might be puzzled to find themselves on the same list:

Laurie E. Osborne has written a pair of interesting articles on Shakespeare and twentieth-century popular romance fiction, one on the use of Shakespearean plots and other allusions in the Regency romance ("Romancing the Bard") and another on the same subject in Harlequin novels and their competitors ("Harlequin Presents: That '70s Shakespeare and Beyond") [1]. In both articles, Osborne links Shakespearean allusions to the romance's problematic status as a popular (and frequently derided) genre; however, the first article relies mostly on literary analysis and authorial testimony, whereas the second pays much more attention to the economics of the romance industry. Moreover, "Harlequin Presents" arrives at more historically nuanced conclusions than "Romancing the Bard," arguing that "even analyzing Shakespearean allusion in a narrowly defined section of mass media, the series romance, reveals that competitive challenges and generic changes, like the emergence and decline of subgenres, influence Shakespeare's function" (144). "Romancing the Bard," nevertheless, usefully charts how allusions to the plays shape the novels' plots, mediate relationships between characters, and even open the way to some narrative self-reflexivity.

Prof. Osborne's work came to my attention because I was thinking about a parallel phenomenon in the Anne Boleyn novels: the role of Thomas Wyatt's poetry in general and "Whoso list to hunt" in particular. Although there are some echoes of Shakespeare's Henry VIII in the Anne Boleyn novels--Cranmer's prophesy (scroll down), for example, probably inspires similar moments in novels like Francis Hackett's Anne Boleyn--Wyatt holds pride of place as a literary source, although Henry VIII's own lyrics also make frequent appearances. As it happens, though, Osborne's work identifies what does not happen in the Wyatt allusions. Part of the difficulty lies in Wyatt's comparative obscurity (up until the late 1980s, at least, "Whoso list to hunt" and "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek" were frequently taught in high schools, but little else); part lies in Wyatt's status as a coterie poet whose work remained in manuscript until after his death; and part lies in the form of the lyric itself. Most of the novels do not allude to Wyatt's work, aside from occasional references to Anne as "wild" or "like a deer"; instead, they simply drop the poems in wholesale. In Philippa Wiat's The Heir of Allington (1973), in which Wyatt is the protagonist, "Whoso list to hunt" is a direct gift from Wyatt to Anne, and one whose meaning is apparently self-evident: "There was no message but the poem and the handwriting spoke for themselves" [2]. By contrast, when Wendy J. Dunn's Wyatt writes the same poem in Dear Heart, How Like You This? (2002), it "had suddenly materialised from deep inside of me, something deeply personal, something that I doubted I would enjoy sharing with one and all" [3]. Here and elsewhere, the poems are usually left almost entirely unglossed; in a manner somewhat akin to the role of lyric poetry in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel, these poems are meant to be somehow pure, unmediated, and spontaneous expressions of the poet's feelings. Wyatt-the-writer, in other words, is the same as "I"-the-speaker. The poems thus function as intensified romantic dialogue (a good lover always breaks into verse, after all...) while simultaneously taking on the role of historical evidence. For novelists who want to hypothesize a love affair between Wyatt and Anne, that is, the lyrics serve as transparent autobiographical testimony. Obviously, for a literary historian, this hypothesis has a number of flaws--not least among them the fact that "Whoso list to hunt" did not spring full-grown from Wyatt's head, but instead revised Petrarch's Sonnet 190.